Post-it Contemporary Cuban Art Competition Awards Its 12th Edition Prizes
The awards ceremony for the twelfth edition of the Post-it Contemporary Cuban Art Competition, an event that reaffirms its commitment to the promotion of emerging Cuban artists, took place this Wednesday, November 12, at the Submarino Amarillo Cultural Center, run by Artex in Havana.
The jury awarded the First Prize to Andy Mendoza for his piece Ocho meses después. The distinction recognizes “the collection and resemanticization of discarded objects in a deliberate act of aesthetic and semiotic adjustment that precisely addresses the present moment: the fissures in the global and contextual fabric of art and the crisis of the urban and social landscape.”
The Second Prize went to Amanda Delgado for her work Veo veo, valued “for the interdisciplinary character of a proposal that embraces elements of psychology, education, and childhood creativity to generate a collective work that blurs the boundaries of authorship, as well as for the originality and freedom with which it adopts animation as an artistic technique.”
Meanwhile, Kevin Oramas received the Third Prize for Habbitepp, standing out “for its ingenuity in the progressive construction of a personal ecosystem, the careful referencing of medieval and conquest bestiaries, of fictional literary worlds, and, above all, for the insularization of an approach that is most often Eurocentric.”
In addition to the main accolades, the jury granted three Honorable Mentions: Leidy Eulalia Rodríguez was recognized for En devenir (Tríptico), thanks to her mastery of watercolor and the careful execution used to enhance visual and narrative threads. Luis Alberto Álvarez was recognized for Collage #13 #22 #21 (Tríptico), in which the harmony, visual rhythm, and compositional cohesion in the collage’s execution were praised. The third Honorable Mention went to Daniel Antón Morera for Artista sin nómina, sin curriculum, sin historia, a work distinguished by its allegorical nature and its intent to denounce urgent issues in the current context.
As a closing recognition, the Awards Jury, together with specialists from the galleries of the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets, decided to grant the Acquisition Prize to Maikol Martini. His piece was praised for its audacity and narrative capacity, the relevant selection of cultural references, the ingenuity to thread personal history into a generational narrative, and the compositional finesse that achieves a happy hybridization of collage and painting.
This edition received a total of 84 artistic proposals, coming from almost all provinces in the country, with a notable representation from Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Las Tunas, Camagüey, and Havana, noted the press release.
After a rigorous selection process carried out by specialists from the Gallery Division of Collage Habana, 36 works were chosen to form the exhibition, displayed simultaneously at the Collage Habana and Galiano galleries.
The final decision rested with the Awards Jury, which met on November 5 under the presidency of Jorge Fernández Torres, Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts. Also on the panel were Julio César Pérez Moracén, Director of the San Alejandro Academy; José Fernández Portal, Curator of the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art; Yamilis Brito Jorge, Visual Artist and Director of the Havana Experimental Graphic Workshop; and Dannys Montes de Oca, Curator and Gallerist at Galería Habana.
With over a decade of trajectory, the Post-it Contemporary Cuban Art Competition reaffirms its role as an indispensable platform for the visibility and circulation of emerging talent in Cuba, contributing significantly to the development and expansion of artistic creation in the country.
Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez
